On the Teaching of (Lab) Writing
The biggest problems with it have nothing to do with words
It’s going to be really hard for anybody entering this week’s “I Bet That Was Cathartic…” writing contest to top Freddie deBoer’s latest, “Pity Writing Studies, the Field That Hates Itself.” He absolutely unloads on his former field, in a way that really highlights his skill as a polemicist. I can’t speak to the accuracy of his characterization of what goes on there, but his command of rhetoric (heh) and invective make it a very entertaining read, even if some of the finer points might need to be salted to taste.
I don’t really have anything to add to that broadside, but something he said in passing reminded me of a tossed-off comment I made a week or so earlier on Twitter, that I had meant to circle back to. Specifically, he describes a particular endpoint of the evolution of Writing Studies as he sees it:
No, there was nothing that you could say was definitively in the field, but there were things that you could definitively say were not, and that was everything that people from outside of the field would assume we cared about. That might include grammar, crafting sentences, formal elements of effective lab reports, writing effective transitions, how to research in the library more efficiently, how to write with style, how to develop a personal voice, genre conventions of writing for different majors, and more.
This reminded me of a discussion about lab writing, now lost to the deliberate ephemerality of Twitter, into which I lobbed a semi-cryptic comment about how I sometimes wonder if we’re doing students a disservice in talking about lab writing as writing because the problems I usually see are of a different character than what most people think of as writing. Namely, most of the stuff on de Boer’s list: the construction of prose on the level of sentences and paragraphs, including an element of style.
When I do formal evaluation of written work by students in lab courses, the grading rubric category that tends to get the biggest workout is “Organization.” The students we get are mostly okay at sentence-level stuff— a bit of a tendency to be choppy and repetitive, but generally okay at basic English grammar. Or at least, not bad enough at it for me to notice— I am a serial abuser of commas and can never keep straight whether “that” or “which” is the correct choice, so I’m not the best person to ask about that. They’re a little iffier at the paragraph level— a lot of their verbs are prone to coming unstuck in time, wandering between past and present and sometimes future tense over the course of consecutive sentences. But that kind of stuff is mostly fixable. On the style level, they have the usual undergraduate problem of thinking that big words are impressive, so I get endless pages of “utilize” in places where “use” would work just fine, and they often try to mix up phrasing in ways that aren’t appropriate for scientific writing, where precision matters more than variety. But again, these are relatively straightforward to fix.
Where they fail, and fail spectacularly is at the level of organization of material. They are absolutely terrible at boiling down the procedure, results, and conclusion to the essential elements, and describing those elements in a way that has a clear and logical flow to it. I tend to get reports that either perfectly recapitulate the instructions from the lab handout, describing each step in order with just enough word changes to not get flagged as plagiarized, or worse yet, the stream-of-consciousness-while-writing report, in which they simply write down things that they remember doing in the order in which they remember them. The resulting text reads a lot like a conversation with a tipsy stranger in a bar who’s telling you a story about people you don’t know, and keeps backing up to explain nicknames and in-jokes and losing the thread along the way.
The realization that I was alluding to in my Twitter comment is that this really isn’t a writing problem, it’s an understanding problem. That is, they’re failing to tell a coherent story not because they don’t know how to tell a story, but because they don’t actually understand the story they’re supposed to be telling. The procedure is either identical to the lab handout or completely scattered because they’re not at all sure which steps are important and which are trivial; the results are a jumble because they’re not clear on which parts matter and which are just establishing baseline levels to serve as a control. And so on.
There is some aspect of this that can be a writing thing— some people just have a better sense of how to put ideas in order to tell a story than others, and as a result will have an easier time crafting lab reports. This is a thing I genuinely struggle with when teaching writing and presentation— I’ll suggest a particular order of topics, and students will ask “Why that order?” and I can’t answer. It’s just instantly obvious to me that those things go in that order, and I can’t really explain why.
(I’ve also encountered students who go in the opposite direction. I had a sophomore once do a report for my quantum optics class on the Aharonov-Bohm effect, and when I met with him to go over his draft, I started the conversation by saying “So, look, you write really well. So well, in fact, that I almost can’t tell that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.” He replied “Yeah, you got me. I didn’t understand this at all.” Then we had a long conversation about the physics, and he ended up writing a genuinely good final draft. He went to law school immediately after graduation, but switched back to physics a year or so later…)
In the vast majority of bad lab reports, though, the problem isn’t at the level of writing, it’s at the level of understanding. It’s exceptionally difficult to write clearly about a situation that you don’t thoroughly understand, and I say that from long experience as a Take-slinger in the blogosphere. You can do the thinking-while-typing thing where you try to write your way to clarity, but it takes considerable skill to pull off, and really isn’t appropriate in a lab-report context. Actually being able to do the things that characterize good scientific writing has to start with a deep understanding of the topic you’re writing about, and most of the students I get bad lab reports from just don’t have that.
To be fair, this is not entirely their fault— they’re usually writing about an experiment that they spent no more than a few hours doing, often following detailed instructions given to them in advance, intended to illustrate a point that they’ve just barely encountered in class. It’s not the least bit surprising that they don’t have a solid grasp of what really matters for the lab report.
And this is where I say we’re doing them a disservice by thinking about this as a writing problem, something that can be fixed by sending them to the tutors in the Writing Center. (Or something that, in the view of a now-retired colleague, wouldn’t even be a problem if the English department were teaching freshman comp properly…) You can clean up sentence-and-paragraph-level stuff that way, getting the commas in the right places and the verbs in the same tense, but if the students who actually did the lab don’t understand it well enough to know which features matter, a writing tutor who isn’t even in the class won’t be able to do a damn thing to help.
So, in the end, getting better lab reports isn’t actually a matter of doing a better job teaching writing. It’s something that can only be fixed by doing better labs, so that students start in a place where they understand what they’ve done well enough to be in a position to write sensibly about it.
I’d love to conclude this with a concrete idea of what sort of labs would be better for this, but I really don’t have a great idea of that. If you’d like to be among the first to know if I think of one, here’s a button you can click:
If have solutions to suggest, or if you’d like to argue with my characterization of the problem, the comments will be open:
I don't grade undergrad lab reports (there are many reasons I am not an academic, and this is on the list), but I do encounter scientific writing by some moderate range of working scientists. While I agree wholeheartedly that failures of understanding lead to failures of writing, I'd say that it's not just a matter of understanding the science; it's also about understanding what the reader might want to learn about the science, and how to convey that. Most of the bad scientific writing I find in the wild takes no account of how people actually read papers (or proposals or whatever), and it often makes me question whether the bad writer in question has done much reading themself.
I think you've hit the nail on the head, here. When I was in engineering school and churning these things out, I just wanted to get it done, and even if I understood *what* I was doing, I was too green to know *what* about it was important.